Art Nouveau Paintings

What is Art Nouveau?

Art Nouveau is an international style of art, architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. Its other characteristics were a sense of dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or whiplash lines, and the use of modern materials, particularly iron, glass, ceramics and later concrete, to create unusual forms and larger open spaces. It was popular between 1890 and 1910, during the period known in France as la Belle Epoque, and was a reaction against the academicism, eclecticism and historicism of 19th-century architecture and decorative art.

Most of what is written about the style concerns buildings, glass and furniture, because that is where it was first made and where the new materials mattered. This collection is the painting side of it: flat pattern, gold, floral motifs and natural forms, asymmetry, and the female figure drawn as a curve. French in origin, and by 1900 everywhere. Gustav Klimt is the center of it. He was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement, and his work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.

The style was known by a different name in each European country, and the artists who made it were rarely only painters: the same hand designed a poster, a stained glass window, a piece of jewelry and a chair. The new materials mattered as much as the drawing, and glass in particular carried the style into every city that adopted it. A house could be built in it, and several were. It was an international style with a French name, and it had its own version in each city that took it up: Vienna, Barcelona, Prague, Moscow, Warsaw, Glasgow. It ran from the early 1890s through la Belle Epoque until the first world war ended the world it was made for. What survives on canvas is the part of the style that still hangs on a wall, and this is where you will find it.

Famous Art Nouveau painters

The Art Nouveau artists in this collection, each with a collection of their own. Between them they cover most of the cities where the style had a name of its own, and three of them were designers first and painters second.

• Gustav Klimt: an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession, whose work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe. His primary subject was the female body, and his figurative works include allegories and portraits as well as landscapes. 104 works here, including The Kiss, the most requested painting of the style anywhere
• Alphonse Mucha: 17 works from the Czech painter whose poster designs gave the style its most copied line
• Koloman Moser: 30 works from the Vienna Secession, the design half of the same circle as Klimt
• Mikhail Vrubel: 38 works, the Russian version of the style, with Faust and Mephisto as a recurring subject
• Ramon Casas: 23 works from Barcelona, alongside 22 by Jozef Mehoffer in Poland and 194 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Paris. Many of the French artists of the style are known now for their posters rather than for their canvases

Famous Art Nouveau paintings

Famous Art Nouveau paintings you can order as oil on canvas. The first two are the best known works of the style that exist as paintings rather than as glass, metal or a printed poster, and the rest are the pictures here with the most page views. The floral pattern and the flat gold ground that the decorative arts made famous are all present in the painting, which is what makes these work so well in a modern room now. Nine of the fourteen are by artists who were also designers, which is the most Art Nouveau fact about the list.

• The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, an oil on canvas with added gold leaf, silver and platinum, painted at some point in 1907 and 1908, during what scholars call his Golden Period
• Danae, Gustav Klimt, 1907
• Lady in Yellow Dress, Max Kurzweil, Vienna
• Decadent Young Woman, Ramon Casas
• Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu in an Automobile, Ramon Casas
• Strange Garden, Jozef Mehoffer
• Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Mikhail Vrubel
• Study Models, Wilhelm Kotarbinski
• Portrait Of A Young Woman, Joan Brull
• Dancing Nymphs, Paul Emile Chabas
• Terror Antiquus, Leon Bakst
• Visitors from over the sea, Nicholas Roerich
• Northern Lake, Tom Thomson, the most viewed painting in this collection
• The Drive, Tom Thomson, Canada

Related styles

Symbolism paintings for sale are the movement Klimt is usually filed under, and in France the two overlap almost completely. Expressionism art reproductions are what the Vienna and Munich circles turn into after 1905. academic paintings are the academicism, eclecticism and historicism of the 19th century that this style was a reaction against.

Frequently asked questions

What is Art Nouveau?

An international style of art, architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts, inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. Its other marks are a sense of dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or a whiplash line, and the use of modern materials, particularly iron, glass, ceramics and later concrete, to create unusual forms and larger open spaces. It was popular between 1890 and 1910, and new artists took it up in a different city every year of that decade.

Which Art Nouveau painting is the most famous?

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, an oil on canvas with gold leaf, silver and platinum painted in 1907 and 1908. It is also the best selling painting in this collection.

Do you sell Art Nouveau posters?

No. Everything here is an oil painting reproduced by hand on canvas, in seven sizes, framed or unframed, and made to order by an artist rather than printed. A great deal of what was designed in this style was made as a poster, a piece of glass or a piece of furniture in the first place, and none of that can be reproduced as an oil painting, which is why this collection is smaller than the literature on the style would suggest.